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Sullivan: California Chrome may be every man's horse

BALTIMORE – The Sport of Kings has a place for commoners. It needs people prepared for prolonged dirty work, to care and clean for the horses from before dawn until after dark, to grunt and strain and sweat

BALTIMORE — The Sport of Kings has a place for commoners. It needs people prepared for prolonged dirty work, to care and clean for the horses from before dawn until after dark, to grunt and strain and sweat and stink so that the rich can revel in vicarious competition.

But racing works best when the peasants can see some possibilities, when commoners come to feel as if they have a stake in the big stakes races, when a team of improbable outsiders crashes the exclusive club and makes off with the trophies.

This is what we're seeing with California Chrome. This is the racing phenomenon that never grows old. When a colt bred for $10,000 rewards a third-tier trainer like Art Sherman and working-stiff owners with the biggest prizes in the sport, people who don't know a fetlock from a furlong feel a little more interested and invested in the races.

Saturday's Preakness Stakes demanded more of the three-year-old chestnut than did the Kentucky Derby two weeks earlier. Jockey Victor Espinoza felt compelled to make his move earlier than he would have wished, held off the equally unregal Ride On Curlin by 1½ lengths, and finished less than a second slower than did Seattle Slew and Affirmed en route to racing's last two Triple Crowns.

For the first time in Preakness history, the man charged with updating the weather vane atop Pimlico's cupola was obliged to include the green jackass symbol of "Dumb Ass Partners," in painting Espinoza's silks.

For the first time in a racing career that spans six decades, Art Sherman imagines he is experiencing the sort of star power of Willie Nelson "coming through the airport."

"I was always kind of a claiming type of trainer," Sherman said. "Now I'm up there with the big boys, and I'm saying, 'Wow.' ... It's just an honor being blessed to have a horse like him."

Thirty-six years since racing's last Triple Crown winner, California Chrome advances to the Belmont Stakes with an underdog story that echoes the blue-collar buzz of recent Derby and Preakness winners Funny Cide (2003) and Smarty Jones (2004).

"This is a nice horse," said co-owner Steve Coburn. "He loves people, he loves what he does and that's why he's America's horse. Because in my opinion this horse, what he's doing for two guys that work their butts off every day just to put beans and bacon on the table, this horse has given everybody else out there the incentive to say, 'You know what? We can do it, too.' "

Brash almost to the point of belligerence and inclined to credit his three-year-old colt with impact far beyond the mutuel windows, Coburn is one of those characters who works best in small doses. His refusal to sell controlling interest in his colt was coupled with gratuitous comments about the spurned suitor who has "people washing his feet for him." Saturday, he praised Pimlico's hospitality by citing his displeasure with Churchill Downs. As Winston Churchill once said of an American diplomat, Coburn is "a bull who carries his own china shop around with him."

Yet Coburn is also inarguably authentic. He's a rough-hewn 61-year-old with a big mustache and a perspiration-ringed cowboy hat who continues to cling to a factory job in the face of life-changing wealth and, also, to the dreamy notion that the first horse he has bred runs with destiny.

"We just hope this horse is letting America know that the little guy can win," Coburn said. "I honestly believe this horse is America's horse. He's giving everybody that little light bulb when it clicks on, 'Say, you know what? We can do this. We can do this with just a little more try.' "

Coburn is probably attaching too much significance to a horse race, but his results continue to match his imagination. As the Mamas and the Papas foretold, California dreaming is becoming a reality.

Tim Sullivan writes for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, a Gannett affiliate.